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John Saillant
The American literature of the first black Atlantic was a body of manuscripts and publications arising from the transatlantic or circumatlantic experiences of black authors from the mid‐eighteenth to the early nineteenth centuries. In these decades, the Atlantic slave trade peaked in the number of captives transported while the slave system was expanding economically, demographically, and territorially. As the terror of the slave system swelled, its opponents hardened. The trade in slaves and enslavement itself were resisted in various ways, ranging from insurrections on land and at sea to political abolitionism in Europe and in North America to revolution in Haiti. Freedpeople were building social institutions in locations as various as Philadelphia, London, Freetown, and central Trinidad. Readers and scholars of literature see in the years from 1760 to 1820 the first sustained efflorescence of publications by black authors. This body of works is still evolving in the twenty‐first century as scholars continue to uncover previously unknown manuscripts. Moreover, the legacies of the slave trade and of slavery are today still subject to reinterpretation in the Americas, Europe, and West Africa, leading inevitably to new understandings of the earliest writings in European languages by black people. The first black Atlantic remains alive today for readers and scholars.
Texts of the first black Atlantic were primarily Anglophone but included some works composed in other European languages and in Arabic. These texts were produced in mainland North America, the Caribbean, England, and Sierra Leone by authors who had lived for at least a time in the Americas. Many were heavily edited by white handlers – patrons, editors, or printers – in the course of publication. A few were translated from one language to another before 1820. Fitting an Atlantic literature, its creators often had made transoceanic voyages, yet some had traveled only along seaboards or within islands while others had joined intercontinental networks of exchange of ideas, values, and texts while barely traveling themselves. Chronology, genre, authorship, and audience intrigue modern scholars. While 1820 can be understood as the end of early American literature, several black‐authored works published between 1821 and 1850 recounted the author’s experiences of the late eighteenth or early nineteenth century. These later works belong alongside the works of the first black Atlantic. Central and familiar genres were poetry, essays, sermons, letters, autobiography, conversion accounts, and travelogues, yet modern scholars also study less “literary” works such as ballads, hymns, church covenants, petitions, and jailhouse confessions. Even runaway slave advertisements – by definition not black authored – have been mined by scholars for black presence. “Performance” is sometimes a more accurate descriptor than is “text.” Texts and performances of the first black Atlantic have also led some scholars to question the notion of “author” assumed in most early modern and modern literary culture. Similarly, the audience apparently intended by a black author varied greatly from text to text. Often the intended audience was obvious, while at other times scholars have identified it through a painstaking process. Multiple intended audiences were sometimes likely. A recent academic concern is black authors’ intersection with print cultures. In some cases, early black authors had open avenues to print cultures, and a few black men labored in print trades. In other cases, the means of appearing in print – reading, writing, editing, funding, and publishing printed works – were mostly unavailable in their lifetimes. For some of those authors, preservation of their handwritten manuscripts, often by white patrons or co‐religionists, allowed posthumous publication. Often such posthumous publication has occurred in the twentieth or the twenty‐first century.
Twentieth‐century and twenty‐first‐century scholars and editors have sought various solutions to the challenges posed by early black publications and manuscripts. The goal of early‐ to mid‐twentieth‐century black bibliophiles was the creation of editions easily understood in a modern idiom. This was the modern black literary professional’s response to early preservationist impulses (often motivated by religion) and print culture (often motivated by abolitionism) that added mightily to the collection and publication of black manuscripts. Yet these early editions are now mostly outdated. Beginning in the late twentieth century, most editors and scholars demanded increasing accuracy in the editions of the texts of the first black Atlantic. Still, even accuracy has not been the end of the story.
For the early twenty‐first century, two metaphors have come forward to summarize and express current scholarly approaches. One metaphor is black‐authored texts as fragments: many documents, whether in manuscript or in print, were preserved in slivers or splinters or were refracted by white transcribers or editors who inevitably selected only certain parts of a black literary performance for preservation. The other metaphor is the archive as an act of violence: preservation of black works and black voices in a selective manner was in its nature a form of racist subjugation. These modern scholars have set ambitious agendas. Those who work with fragments use scholarly tools to reconstruct both texts and contexts, often with slim evidence. Those who respond to violence in the archive seek origins of black works and black voices antecedent to the racism inherent in preservation, transcription, publication, and other print culture acts. Yet the history of early black Atlantic writing, from preservation and publication, through the renaissance initiated by black bibliophiles, through modern editions has always been rooted in the first preservationists, no matter how racist they or their contexts might have been.
Genesis of the Idea of the Black Atlantic
If scholars of the first black Atlantic have ranged widely in thinking about language, chronology, genre, authorship, audience, performance, and print culture – and if scholars have been searching for metaphors like “fragment” and “violence” – there has been no need to range far afield for the term “the black Atlantic.” Paul Gilroy (1993) established the term in modern scholarship. The essentials of Gilroy’s definition were, however, assumed in some of the earliest professional scholarship on Africa‐related topics, such as essays in the interdisciplinary Journal of Negro History, first issued in 1916. Furthermore, the authors of the first black Atlantic themselves embodied many of Gilroy’s themes; they also predicted many of the criticisms of The Black Atlantic a century and a half or more before Gilroy’s critics were born. The arguments of The Black Atlantic and responses to them had previously been made, in idioms of the eighteenth century and the early nineteenth century, in the texts and the performances of the first black Atlantic. In short, the black Atlantic seemed new at the end of the twentieth century, yet it had been recognized by some of its participants since the late eighteenth century and has been treated by scholars since the early twentieth century.
Gilroy’s arguments should be the starting place today simply because The Black Atlantic struck a chord in modern readers by corroborating their experience of a racialized world. The Black Atlantic is now one of black literary scholarship’s most quoted and cited books. Gilroy sought to identify and “occupy” a “space” separate from, albeit in between, “racist, nationalist or ethnically absolutist discourses” (1). Far from seeing these discourses as “mutually exclusive” (115), Gilroy argued that a transfigurative black expressive culture (including literature but much else too) evolved in the interstices of competing, inconsistent discourses. The power of the slave‐trade system and the power of the plantation‐slavery system pushed black expressive culture into “anti‐discursive and extra‐linguistic” directions (57). Defined in large part by such power and the black responses to it, the Atlantic littoral could be, Gilroy asserted, “one single, complex unit of analysis” (15). Naturally enough, then, so could the black Atlantic. Black expressive culture itself had not been locked into either “the nation state” or “the constraints of ethnicity” (19), so, Gilroy suggested, neither should modern scholars of African‐Atlantic culture. In Gilroy’s view, black expressive culture and African‐Atlantic people themselves neither melted completely into the nation‐states created by European colonization nor gripped loyally onto African cultures. Instead they maintained in‐between spaces varying according to region and time. Part of such variety was aesthetics, so that black literary engagements ranging from the neoclassical to the revolutionary can credibly be understood as efflorescences of the black Atlantic. In one sense, The Black Atlantic was a manifesto urging scholars to catch up with the Harlem Renaissance and négritude, reggae and zouk, capoeira and the lindy hop. In another sense, Gilroy’s argument was part of twentieth‐century academic attention to the relationship between centers and peripheries in colonialist or imperialist systems.
Ultimately Gilroy favored “anti‐anti‐essentialist” scholarship (102), which neither merged black expressive culture into “pan‐Africanism” nor dissolved all blackness into a “pluralist” racially flexible Atlantic world (31). His intention seems to have been an evolutionary, transfiguring blackness, rarely in equilibrium but rather punctuated differently in various times and places throughout the Atlantic world. Scholarship then could fruitfully analyze the “syncretic complexity of black expressive cultures” (101), establish a “more modest conception of connectedness,” and recognize possible “inner asymmetry and differentiation of black cultures” (120). Ultimately, the black Atlantic was situated against Euro‐American culture in a relationship of “antagonistic indebtedness” (191). Syncretism and parallel concepts like diaspora, hybridity, bricolage, liminality, métissage, and mestizaje had by 1993 long been staples for early Americanists. Yet Gilroy inspired scholars working on black culture in the early Americas because he laid bare syncretism (or diaspora, hybridity, bricolage, liminality, métissage, or mestizaje) as the means used by black people for affiliating themselves to Euro‐American nation‐states at the same time as they identified themselves with African cultural formations.
In a nutshell, syncretism allowed African‐Atlantic people to be simultaneously more Euro‐American and more African. Such intertwined affiliation was crucial for many reasons. The power of modern nation‐states was required for the interdiction of the slave trade and then of slavery, and for postslavery achievements such as suffrage. State action following activism became essential to abolitionism: the pro‐black cause required state power in support. Moreover, race as a powerful category of identification (including self‐identification) in the entire modern history of the Americas has situated individuals in relation to state and society yet alienated the same individuals from state and society. Racialized identity has often equated to one foot in and one foot out of state and society. And black expressive culture has often been routed through the media (for instance, financial and technological) of Euro‐American society. It seems likely that many scholars and readers who were convinced by The Black Atlantic were themselves people who felt multiplicity in their lives. Gilroy distilled and crystallized that feeling into a state of two‐in‐one, African and Euro‐American.
Scholars have been dismayed as well as inspired by The Black Atlantic. An overview of critiques of work will help us better understand modern early African‐Americanist scholarship. Furthermore, it can help us see that critiques of Gilroy’s work were anticipated by the authors and performers of the first black Atlantic. The human black Atlantic existed long before the book of that name, so it makes sense that the inhabitants of the human version lived the issues raised by Gilroy and his critics. One critique has been that in taking black Anglophone experience as paradigmatic, Gilroy excludes parallel developments of syncretism and cultural exchange, particularly those in which Africans were actors in parts of the world other than the Atlantic littoral – in, for example, the rim of the Indian Ocean. A second critique has been that even within the black Atlantic Gilroy downplays the variety of black expressive culture by favoring only a few metropoles that hardly reflect the variety of environments in which African‐descended peoples lived – for example, rural, Caribbean, and Canadian locations. A third critique has been that Gilroy overweights reaction to modernity and underweights Africanity and a variety of African heritages, which survive among modern African‐descended peoples either by choice or in less conscious ways. Finally, a fourth critique has been that a focus on expressive culture as a response to the slave trade and slavery elides the power of nation‐states, confusing cultural influence and state power when the latter has been used – legislatively, judicially, militarily, diplomatically, ecologically, or economically – sometimes for, sometimes against, black people.
Archival and Textual History of the First Black Atlantic
The publication history of the texts of the first black Atlantic demands that we consider the evolution of access to these works, from the moment spoken words were transcribed or a sheaf of papers was placed in a drawer to the most recent letterpress or Internet editions. We cannot separate our understanding of these texts from the ways they have (or have not) become available to readers. The media in which we have encountered the first black Atlantic have always been crucial to understanding it. Many of the relevant texts were first published only after substantial editing. Modern editions sometimes attempt to undo the first waves of editorial intervention. And black‐authored manuscripts of the years 1760 to 1820 are still being uncovered. The media we use are likely to evolve dramatically in the twenty‐first century. English‐language anthologies have collected established works along with, sometimes, rare publications, which survive in only one or two copies worldwide. Three examples are Potkay and Burr (1995), Carretta (1996), and Brooks and Saillant (2002). Each anthology has its own focus. The first presents selections from a few well‐known writers that highlight their affinities with European ideas and values. The second publishes a sweep of works by Briton Hammon, Jupiter Hammon, James Albert Ukawsaw Gronniosaw, Phillis Wheatley, Francis Williams, Ignatius Sancho, John Marrant, Johnson Green, Belinda, Quobna Ottobah Cugoano, Olaudah Equiano, Benjamin Banneker, George Liele, David George, Boston King, and Venture Smith, recording a clamor of black voices. The third republishes a small number of works, including several rare imprints, with a focus on the origins of a self‐conscious black transatlanticism.
Having cited and applauded these anthologies, scholars inevitably envision replacing them. One reason is that discovery of new manuscripts along with new media of digital humanities will create not only a revised corpus of works but also new ways of comprehending it. Indeed it becomes possible with new media of digital humanities to envision a fluid text, initially crafted and recrafted by a black author, then further recrafted and revised, often by white handlers, as it traveled from manuscript to print. It is likely that black‐authored works were among the most fluid, among the most prone to heavy handling, of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Whatever the type and degree of fluidity, anthologies should reveal it instead of presenting a static text. Another reason is that some of the conditions of the first black Atlantic are being replicated now, with a variety of ethnic groups, including African ones. Scholarship and instruction on this period are crucially important in the twenty‐first century, which so far has experienced large‐scale global migrations, often forced or semi‐forced, often spurred by military conflict or uneven economic development. These were essential conditions of the transatlantic slave trade. Furthermore, the slave‐trade era was marked by ecological changes in African slave‐trading zones, west Atlantic slave plantations, and Caribbean tropical forests. Some modern migration is virtually forced by environmental degradation or by repurposing of land (both usually associated, like the slave trade, with international commerce). And migration, whether voluntary or forced, often leads to clashes over technology. As the world – human, cultural, martial, natural, technological – is being reshaped in the twenty‐first century, new iterations of the first black Atlantic are blooming. As long as voluntary, semi‐voluntary, and forced migration persist in the world and as long as they are accompanied by cultural interchange, the works of the first black Atlantic as records of intercultural exchange will remain relevant in education. Moreover, a twenty‐first‐century increase in the number of Arabic‐speaking students, many of them refugees, in North American and European schools suggests the possibility of renewed relevance of early black Atlantic authors such as Ayyub ben Suleiman (Job ben Solomon), Omar ibn Said, and Abdr‐Rahman Ibrahim.
Modern editions of individual authors of the first black Atlantic have been major achievements of black literary scholarship, yet each one has been challenged by later editors. Rather than listing outdated editions, we acknowledge here some of the first modern editors, then provide titles of the most reliable and complete twenty‐first‐century editions. Collectors and bibliophiles such as Arturo Schomburg and Dorothy Porter Wesley deserve credit for the earliest twentieth‐century editions. Their efforts were matched in scholarship by such luminaries as Charles Wesley, Carter G. Woodson, and Sterling Brown. This generation broke ground, as did The Journal of Negro History, for black people in academia, museums, libraries, and professional academic organizations. They were followed by editors Julian Bond, Paul Edwards, Philip D. Curtin, Richard Newman, John Shields, Stanley Austin Ransom, Sondra O’Neale, William L. Andrews, and Henry Louis Gates, Jr. Some among this generation led the mid‐twentieth‐century advances in scholarship on Africa and African‐descended peoples that drew inspiration from the African anti‐colonialist wars and the US Civil Rights movement. Since 1990, important editions have included those by Christopher Fyfe (1992), Iain McCalman (1992), Graham Russell Hodges (1993), Moira Ferguson (1993), Vincent Carretta (2001), Carretta (2003), and Chris Bongie (2014).
The First Figures
Olaudah Equiano (c. 1745–1797) exemplified many elements of the first black Atlantic as we understand it in the twenty‐first century. He asserted an African birth and was politically active in writing petitions to Parliament and to the British crown, petitioning and arguing for the interdiction of the British slave trade, and overseeing one phase of the English efforts to establish a settlement in West Africa (first named Granville Town, Province of Freedom, then Freetown, Sierra Leone). Having done his best to influence Parliament to use its power against the slave trade, he died before the 1807 interdiction of the slave trade in the British empire. Insofar as contemporary evidence suggests that he was born in the Carolinas (Carretta 2005: 8–9, 319–320), Equiano adopted an African identity as he became abolitionist and as he utilized political tools against the slave trade. Paradigmatic of the black Atlantic, Equiano became at once both more African and more Euro‐American as he became active in politics and in literary culture. He embedded his 1789 Interesting Narrative (Carretta 2003) in a variety of British literary traditions – for example, the travelogue, the petition for redress of grievances, the pro‐Parliament language of the 1688 Glorious Revolution, the pressing concern with virtue and commerce, and the Protestant spiritual autobiography – yet he included many instances of black expressive culture enacted outside European metropoles. Equiano famously described the music, dance, and martial exercises of his purported birthplace, speculated on the African origins of his name, and recounted occasions in which he as an adult conversed with African‐born New World blacks. Although Equiano did not relay the full substance of the conversations, it was almost certainly those exchanges, between himself as a black man adept in literary culture and others who were not adept, that provided him information he used in the West African and Middle Passage sections of the Narrative. It seems clear that Equiano understood that there were many circles of black expressive culture that were invisible in Euro‐American centers of political power. Biblical allusions in the Narrative imply that he was assuming the syncretic role of a black Moses speaking, in writing, for his people as well as that of a black Joseph acting as the savior, as an abolitionist, of his people. Similarly, he put technology, ranging from navigation tools to engraved portraiture to the printing press, into the service of black freedom. His text stretched into many parts of the Atlantic world – tropical to polar – yet it was clear that ultimately Equiano favored a metropolitan, cosmopolitan, temperate home for himself. Assuming that Equiano was born in the English North American colonies, we see that his adopted African identity is most accurately described not as foundational but as evolutionary. Africanity was not a matter of origins but of the usefulness of Africa for abolitionist goals. Africa was not the continent or its cultures, but rather whatever Equiano as an abolitionist wanted or needed it to be. If his connection with Africa seems too contrived for twenty‐first‐century tastes, it is worth remembering that Equiano was arguing aggressively against the British slave trade, a colossus of the late eighteenth century. A fictionalized origin hardly detracts from his achievement.
Scholarship on Equiano is so vast that only highlights representing various approaches can be mentioned. James Walvin (2000) sets his subject in a variety of contexts ranging from West African slaveholding and slave‐trading societies, to the Atlantic slave trade and New World slavery, to maritime commerce, to English and Irish radical politics. Walvin’s subject is Equiano the Igbo who became English, the free African who became slave, then slave trader, then abolitionist. Carretta (2005) has been controversial for arguing that the documentary record on Equiano (known as Gustavus Vassa) indicates that he was born in North America, not in West Africa. Furor aside, Carretta provides more detail than has any other scholar on Equiano’s travels, abolitionist activism, life as a mariner, and use of literary sources. Bible narratives are analyzed as structuring elements of Equiano’s Narrative in Phillip Richards (2000). Srinivas Aravamudan (1999) turns the spotlight on the readers who have argued over whether Equiano belonged in a British or American literary tradition. Aravamudan counters that such literary traditions help to reify nationalism and to obscure the way anti‐black nationalism suppresses racial and ethnic differences within the expanding borders of the modern nation‐state. Tropicopolitans imagines Equiano’s Narrative as a partner to the less literary compositions of the black Anglo‐American settlers of early Sierra Leone rather than as a work within an English or American tradition. Eric D. Lamore (2016) emphasizes the fluidity of the Narrative. Within a generation of Equiano’s death, his readers were recrafting, revising, and republishing his work in order to make it serve new purposes. Although twentieth‐century and twenty‐first‐century editorial and publishing norms favor stable documents, the texts of the first black Atlantic were often fluid – transcribed, written, rewritten, performed, bowdlerized, and the like. The relatively marginal status of black authors may have led readers and editors to infer that black‐authored texts were open for revision by white handlers. An author’s marginal status implied less concern for the stability of his or her writings. Nonetheless, textual fluidity sometimes functioned in concert with syncretism, adapting texts to changing environments.
Equiano’s peers have of course also attracted scholarly attention. One starting point has been performance, a prominent element in black expressive culture. Literary texts sometimes recounted, for example, musical performances that resulted as songs and people traveled. A large number of primary sources mentioned musical performance briefly, while a few were centered around music. Musical performance, vocal or instrumental, sacred or secular, was attested at length by authors like John Marrant (1755–1791) and John Jea (c. 1773–after 1816), while both Jea and Richard Allen (1760–1831) composed hymns and compiled hymnbooks (Jea 1816; Walters 1999). Elizabeth Maddox Dillon (2012) argues that noise, aurally and temporally prior to music and to language, challenged exclusionary communities and prompted the incorporation of marginalized people into existing or newly created communities. Dillon uses sources controlled to a large degree by a black author, yet it was more common that white authors provided material through which black performance, musical or otherwise, can be viewed and analyzed. Two examinations of white‐authored texts are by Richard C. Rath (1993) and David Waldstreicher (1999). The first argues that African musical performances were adapted by slaves, under pressure from masters, to new circumstances and new musical instruments in Jamaica. The second analyzes performances of freedom by black runaways along with the ways that newspapers advertised yet sought to squash those efforts. An additional starting point has been oratory, another form of black performance that was sometimes noted in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Scholarly commentary on black oratory has been stimulated by the fact that black men and black women who spoke effectively and convincingly in public commanded the attention of many observers. One example is provided by Ryan Hanley (2016). Commentary on performativity in the first black Atlantic seems likely to attract the attention of twenty‐first‐century scholars. Although so far scholars have used mostly descriptions of musical performances or orators, it seems likely that future scholars will press into new sources and new methods.
As we turn from performances to texts, the question of language becomes urgent. Black authors wrote in languages other than English. Christine Levecq (2013) has argued, in an essential article on Jacobus Capitein, that skill in European and African languages made possible a black cosmopolitanism that sought to build bridges between European and African modes of thought and social practices. Sometimes black authors wrote in forms and media that require that we expand a traditional definition of the text. Grey Gundaker (1998) argues that in the African diaspora many forms of non‐codex inscription, such as scarification and mortuary symbology, should be considered writing. Early nineteenth‐century Muslim slaves possessed sacred or legal texts (or fragments of them) in Arabic, while some wrote in Arabic. At least one claim of freedom was written in Arabic by an American slave. Michael A. Gomez (2000) notes that there were many New World Africans who were Muslim or were influenced by Islam.
A crucial Francophone author of the first black Atlantic was Haitian Jean Louis Vastey (1781–1820), knighted Baron de Jean Louis Vastey (also sometimes with the given names Pompée Valentin attributed). Although details of his life are scanty, it seems likely that from 1790 to 1794 Vastey lived in France, then returned to Haiti, where he became tutor to the son of Henri Christophe (1767–1820), who was crowned Henry I, King of Haiti. Vastey was in effect Henry’s court philosopher. Representative of the groundbreaking scholarship on Vastey are Marlene L. Daut (2012) and Doris L. Garraway (2012). In the 1810s, Vastey emerged as a commentator on revolutions of the Atlantic world from the 1680s to the 1790s: the English Glorious Revolution, the American War of Independence, and the Haitian Revolution. He reflected on the importance of a printing press in Haiti, where his works appeared (they were also translated into English by the 1820s for Anglophone readers). Le Système Colonial Dévoilé (The Colonial System Unveiled) was a stinging rebuke of French colonialism and its horrors. It is clear that varieties of language (in the broadest sense) should be part of future research in the first black Atlantic. Syncretism as “antagonistic indebtedness” (Gilroy 1993: 191) was at work in pro‐black, antislavery, and anti‐colonialist ways in several languages before 1820. Vastey himself reflected on language since he commented on the speech of ordinary Haitians, the misuse of words to hide the crimes of slavery and colonialism, the importance of publishing works by Haitians in Haiti itself, and the value for Haitians of expressions of political rights arising from England’s 1688 Glorious Revolution (as opposed to the language of the American and French Revolutions).
Themes and Genres of the First Black Atlantic
This chapter so far has emphasized variety within the first black Atlantic. Yet some central topics and genres arrested the attention of its authors. The remainder of this essay is devoted to topics and genres the authors of the first black Atlantic chose as important for themselves.
One such topic was Protestant theology. The pietism of early African American and Afro‐British has been emphasized by many scholars. Early African American and Afro‐British theology has been less often examined, partly because of a disciplinary divide that separates scholarship on the Reformation and its aftermath from scholarship on African, Afro‐British, and African American topics. For instance, the first black Atlantic included one of the most profound engagements with theodicy in the history of Christian theology, yet modern theodical analysis of early black Christianity is rare. Scholars have often argued that early black Christianity became (in Gilroy’s terms) part of black expressive culture as religion became pietistic, spiritistic, and enthusiastic. Yet an equally compelling argument is that black expressive culture found its heart in theodicy. In black Christianity, theodicy was not alien to spirited expression. Theodicy was inside spirited expression. Religious insight often was the recognition of theodicy as the beginning and end of a black Christian experience.
A fruitful approach here to religion in the first black Atlantic is to summarize both its pietism and its theology, then to emphasize that black‐authored religious texts of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries have been revealed through a combination of black authorship, white handling, and manuscript preservation. In other words, the cutting edge of scholarship now strips away the varnish with which early black religious texts were finished for an audience. We should consider finished texts as only part of an assemblage of manuscripts touched by various hands in environments black, white, and mixed. Since our comprehension of early black Protestantism has itself been manipulated by those hands, one trend is to understand the manipulations as best as we can. Here we begin with a general definition of early black Protestantism, then proceed to texts and the problem of the ways they were handled.
Early black Protestantism in the Americas, England, and West Africa was theologically Calvinist, with black emphases: the providential God would overrule the sins of slave traders, slaveholders, and racists; the conversion experience of suffering and humiliation followed by grace and justification corroborated the deepest structuring elements of the experience of black Christians; spirited preaching was a performative act at which some black men and a few black women so excelled that where black revivalists (often itinerants) appeared audiences wore them out with pleas for more and more sermons and more and more travel to deliver them. It would require decades of religious development before a free‐will or Arminian version of black Protestantism would be possible in Africa, Europe, or the Americas. In spots in the contemporary black Atlantic, such as some Baptist congregations in Trinidad, Calvinism is explicitly affirmed today.
In the first black Atlantic, pietism, theology, and a drive to preserve black‐authored manuscripts worked so thoroughly together that one should not be considered without the other two. Black Protestants Phillis Wheatley, John Marrant, the Paul brothers (Thomas, Nathaniel, Benjamin, and Shadrack), the Hart sisters (Anne and Elizabeth), and Lemuel Haynes all participated, from various points in the Atlantic littoral, in the transatlantic evangelical Calvinist network of revivalists, worshipers, and believers who treasured and saved handwritten accounts of black religiosity. The greatest acts of preservation of manuscripts written in the hand of black authors were almost certainly motivated by English and American Protestantism. Some of Wheatley’s poems and letters survive in manuscript. A similar situation occurred with the Paul brothers. Fragmentary transcriptions and commentary, both by white auditors, survive from their early years of activity, 1803–1819, in New England and New York, while documents the Pauls themselves penned survive from their more mature years, 1815–1829, when they traveled (Haiti, England, and Upper Canada were among the destinations of the various brothers) on pro‐black and antislavery missions (Saillant 2016). Although Marrant himself wrote, he became known through the creations of white Englishmen who heard him speak in public. Both Wheatley and Marrant encountered the great Calvinist itinerant George Whitefield. The Antiguan Hart sisters were converted by his equally great free‐will counterpart, Thomas Coke. Letters to an English Methodist from the Hart sisters (Ferguson 1993) describe their conversions as well as the obeah practices of Antiguan slaves. Lemuel Haynes (Newman 1989) set himself in a New England Edwardsean network. Yet like some white New England Edwardseans, he excoriated Atlantic slave traders and New World slaveholders and he envisioned a racially equalitarian and harmonious society. Haynes was the most adept of the early black Christian theologians, yet all the writers mentioned in this paragraph grappled with the theological matters of their day.
One author – post‐1820 but writing about earlier experiences – who revealed the way that black people transported both faith and texts around the Atlantic world was Nancy Prince. Born in Massachusetts and reared in a Calvinist Congregational church, Prince traveled in New England, visited England and Denmark, and lived for a time in Russia and then in Jamaica. As she traveled, her faith evolved toward Arminianism and she joined a free‐will Baptist church. It was on behalf of the free‐will Baptists that she visited Jamaica as a missionary, but she was appalled at the syncretic Afro‐Baptist faith she encountered there. The earliest Jamaican Baptists were also Calvinist, representing faith that Prince had transcended. Calvinism and black folk practices were equally outmoded for her. Additionally, her works suggest the pressure applied to a text handled in a racist system. They were probably altered by white editors, patrons, or friends. Appearing in several editions, her memoir (Walters 1990) exhibited a characteristic feature of early black writing. In the 1850 first edition of her memoir, she concluded with a set of theological reflections. In an act of the type that stuns modern scholars, these were deleted from later editions, possibly by white editors. A similar process occurred with an earlier Jamaican Afro‐Baptist, George Liele. Liele had lived in Virginia, Georgia, and South Carolina before fleeing to Jamaica in 1783 with the British defeat in the War of Independence. Liele and other black Jamaican Baptists used one of the most venerated genres known from the Bible and from Protestant church practice to form a congregation – the covenant. To bind themselves together in 1783 as a congregation, they wrote and signed The Covenant of the Anabaptist Church, which was rewritten by white men such as a court recorder who inscribed it into colonial records and an English minister who published it in an evangelical magazine (Lawson 2012; Pulis 2006).
With these religious texts in hand today, scholars see Christian faith traveling and transforming as black people, with pro‐black and antislavery aims, moved through the Atlantic world. As physical objects, the texts themselves were often crafted for travel. Scholars also see a high degree of textual fluidity, a process of change through which many documents went, sometimes in the control of a black author, but often not. The 1785 Narrative of the Lord’s Wonderful Dealings with John Marrant, a Black exemplified this process (Brooks and Saillant 2002: 47–75). The most important impulse of the documentary editions mentioned above was the establishment of an authoritative text, as much in the control of the black author as seems possible. This corrected earlier practices. It seems likely that scholars in the twenty‐first century will not prioritize authoritative texts but will rather disaggregate the known versions of texts and analyze the forces that led to fluid texts. Whether black‐authored works were more fluid than white‐authored ones and, if so, whether the black Atlantic context itself made them more fluid are questions that seem almost certain to attract scholarly attention.
The transatlantic slave system – the massive slave‐trading and slaveholding network spanning the Atlantic world – matched religion as a topic for authors of the first black Atlantic. Every author of this generation mentioned the slave system either directly or indirectly. Captivity and enslavement formed the first black Atlantic as its inhabitants experienced it. Every author of the first black Atlantic was a critic of the slave system. Yet that statement hardly does justice to the variety of their approaches, nor does it help us precisely situate their writings and their activities in the history of abolitionism. The first black Atlantic included a gradual revelation of the way the slave trade and slavery would be effectually attacked: abolitionist activism, whether social, political, or literary, followed by state action, whether legislative or military. One form of state action, often forgotten today, was naval insofar as both English and American vessels patrolled the Atlantic in an effort to stem the slave trade, interdicted in 1807–1808. More than 100,000 of the victims of the illegal slave trades became known as “recaptives” – men, women, and children, seized from slave traders after 1807 and deposited in settlements in the West Indies or West Africa. Since awareness of a method that would prove effectual against the slave system developed over several decades, the authors of the first black Atlantic evinced a creative variety of approaches to abolition. Our best approach here is to describe the main forms.
Once again, Equiano, with his Afro‐Briton companion, Quobna Ottobah Cugoano (c. 1757–1791), set the cutting edge. Born in Fante society (in modern‐day Ghana), Cugoano was sold into the slave trade around 1770, worked as a slave in the West Indies, then arrived, with his master, in England in 1772. He was a sharp critic of the slave trade and West Indian slavery (Carretta 1999). Equiano and Cugoano were among the earliest to recognize that the power of the national (indeed in their case imperial) state would be necessary in the fight against the slave trade and slavery. Both black men were involved in British abolitionism as actors and as authors. Today most readers respond to Equiano’s account of his life, which is the bulk of his narrative (Carretta 2003). Yet in his time, the frame of the work – a petition to Parliament at the beginning of the book and a petition to Queen Charlotte at the end – were the potent political elements. Equiano’s memoir can be construed as his credentials, as it were, for submitting a petition to officials of the British government. Self‐consciously English, Equiano exercised the right, common to subjects and citizens, of petitioning government for redress of grievances. Although he did not live to see it, Equiano prophesied the way the British slave trade would end: through parliamentary power. However, we should not let his foresight blind us to the paths not taken in abolitionism.
Some early black authors understood liberation as primarily an individual matter, not a communal one. One example is John Jea (Hodges 1993), who claimed a free West African birth but was probably born a slave in New York around 1773 in the household of slave owners of Dutch descent. Jea criticized the slave trade and slavery, yet wrote barely a word in defense of any unfree person but himself. An abolitionist for one and of one raises interesting questions. Scholars have parsed Jea’s writings for opposition to slavery with various results. Some early black authors barely imagined that slavery could end, committing themselves to an ameliorationist strategy of improving the lives of blacks whether slave or free. The Antiguan Hart sisters best represented this stance (Ferguson 1993). Some early black authors sought to express the communal life of free blacks and freedpeople as they built their own institutions in a land where many of their own color were still enslaved. Richard Allen and the Paul brothers were such authors (Newman 2008; Saillant 2016). Some early black authors were migrants, who fled home, often in the company of many, in the hope of freedom in a new land. Marrant, Liele, and Prince all contributed to the early black literature of migration, sometimes with utopian hopes that were crushed when freedom proved hard to obtain anywhere in an Atlantic world everywhere touched by the slave system. Some early black antislavery authors should also be described as postslavery thinkers, for they seem to have understood that the end of slavery was one problem but the beginning of freedom was another problem. Aware of many forms of unfreedom, they focused on religion, government, or social relations that would maintain freedom against the odds. Wheatley, Haynes, and Vastey were foremost among these. Many early black authors opened discussion of economic independence and a role in the market economy as antidotes to enslavement. This discussion would become central with the settlement of Liberia in 1822 and with Frederick Douglass’s first autobiography in 1845. But the seeds of economic independence were everywhere in the first black Atlantic: Marrant’s musicianship, Equiano’s navigation skills, James Forten’s sail‐making company, Benjamin Banneker’s almanacs, Venture Smith’s fishing enterprise, and black Baptist ministers in pulpits that they hoped might be supported by black congregations (Carretta 1996).
Late twentieth‐century and twenty‐first‐century scholarship evinces a renewed appreciation for the genres of the first black Atlantic. In the 1960s and 1970s, despite the urge to collect old documents, early black Anglophone authors seemed of less interest than those of the antebellum and postslavery decades. The earlier authors seemed at first glance to be overly derivative and imitative of eighteenth‐century English and American literature, thus presumably less connected to abolitionism and blackness. Recent scholars have reflected more deeply. One influential paradigm has been the “Talking Book,” famously discussed in Gates, Jr. (1988: xxv, 127–132). Gates argued that early black authors represented their encounters with literacy and with the powers of the literate. The first encounter was with the book they could not read, that did not speak to them, the object seemingly endowed with a magic for whites, not for blacks. The second encounter was with a book they could read, an object of power but not magic. The third encounter was with a book they could write and, crucially, as subjects adding their own voice, revise. The book as magical object was known in many places in the early modern Atlantic world, and scholars before Gates had examined its role as a symbol (sometimes described as a fetish) of power, technology, and colonialism. Gates brought to scholarship an emphasis on blacks’ self‐actualization in seizing the book and making it their own through writing and revising. A second approach has been to a black code hidden inside texts. Black authors might have been adept at crafting texts with different meanings, some overt, some covert. This craft was similar to what Gates described as signifying (1988: 89–94), yet it overlapped with some forms of biblical hermeneutics. Wheatley’s poetry (Carretta 2001) is probably the early black literature most mined for hidden codes, perhaps because many of them were occasional poems that make modern readers yearn for deeper meanings. There is no question that the dangers and pressures of the slave system seem to have suggested to early black authors that part of the message of a text should be veiled. Gilroy (1993) discussed “anti‐discursive and extra‐linguistic” directions in black expressive culture (57), yet in early black writing there was almost certainly at points a subdiscursive message directed to black readers.
A third approach has been attention to overlap and imbrication between eighteenth‐century Anglo‐American literature and early black writing. Even for non‐Anglophone writers like Vastey this was true insofar as he praised the Glorious Revolution and the English Bill of Rights (in contradistinction to the American and French parallels). The genres of eighteenth‐century Anglo‐American literature were flexible enough to encompass black authors’ commentary on society and self as well as on slavery and freedom. A few examples must suffice, starting with Equiano’s manipulation of genre. Two of the most prominent strains in English literature (though at times in conflict with each other in England) appear in his narrative (Carretta 2003). First is the country or republican perception of older English liberty lost under the heel of modern tyranny. Second is the anti‐aristocratic belief – the “moneyed interest” over the “landed interest” – in maritime commerce as the mainstay and the glory of the British empire. Equiano makes sense today as a black man enslaved and an entrepreneur seeking autonomy. Lost freedom, whether African or English, struck a resounding chord in English readers, as did the value of maritime commerce. Equiano wrote as an Englishman when he criticized an English institution. He made English genres black and thus made the best case possible in his milieu for black freedom. Wheatley drew from a number of poetic genres known in eighteenth‐century Anglo‐American literature – elegy, georgic, epyllion, and hymn – even as several of her poems reflected the patriot cause in the War of Independence as well as proto‐abolitionism. Indeed, it seems plausible to name the American Revolution “the Wheatleyan moment” (Waldstreicher 2011). Hymns were crucial for Wheatley – as for many early black writers – because they gave her a foundation of meter and rhyme, internalized through performance in congregational singing. Designed to instruct and delight, English poetry, including hymns, afforded Wheatley ample room to instruct her readers about slavery and racism even as she delighted them through rhyme, meter, elevated diction, and insight into some of the central political and theological issues of her day. Affiliation to genre and tradition meant for her what it meant for contemporaneous poets and contemporaneous hymnists: a way of structuring intense pain and intense pleasure so they can be set in a work of art and communicated for instruction and delight as much as for liberty and republican politics.
Toward Continuing Scholarship
Much remains to learn about the first black Atlantic, from the varieties of its syncretisms and its expressions, to the ways its texts were preserved, revised, published, and revised again, to its connections to the slave system and later forms of labor and migration, to its connections to religion, politics, abolitionism, and literary genres and traditions. The metaphors of “fragment” and “violence” remain alive among scholars as they reflect on their work and communicate it to others. Other metaphors will doubtless come to characterize our work. In classrooms and in scholarship, towering figures like Equiano and Wheatley attract the largest share of attention, as do of course important themes like religion, the slave system, and abolitionism. Yet a number of other figures, other themes, and other locations in the Atlantic littoral are prominent on the horizon of twenty‐first‐century pedagogy and scholarship. New methods of understanding texts, analysis of non‐codex inscription, attention to performance, and the digital humanities all hold a promise of a more nuanced and more profound understanding of the first black Atlantic.
References
Further Reading
See also: chapter 7 (africans in early america); chapter 10 (acknowledging early american poetry); chapter 13 (the varieties of religious expression in early american literature); chapter 16 (captivity recast); chapter 19 (early american evangelical print culture); chapter 23 (revolutionary print culture, 1763–1776); chapter 31 (haiti and the early american imagination).